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Andrew Pudewa, founder and director of the Institute for Excellence in Writing, joins us today to explore the neurological development of reading skills in children.

Andrew shares invaluable insights on the dangers of pushing reading too early, the benefits of phonics-based approaches, and the importance of reading aloud to children to build vocabulary beyond their decoding abilities. Whether your child is an early reader or showing signs of dyslexia, Pudewa offers reassurance to parents while providing a roadmap for nurturing lifelong readers.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.

Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us someone that many of you will know, Andrew Pudewa. Welcome, Andrew.

Andrew Pudewa:
Thank you, Marlin. It's always good to talk and see you.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, it's good to have you on again. Andrew, as many of you know, is the founder of the Institute for Excellence in Writing. And today we're going to talk a bit about reading and its importance foundationally. But Andrew, first, for those people that may not know you, please introduce yourself, your background, your family, your education, that sort of thing.

Andrew Pudewa:
Okay. Well, thumbnail version. Let's see. Most important thing about me is I have 18 grandchildren now.

And that's the greatest joy. I always tell young people, have as many kids as you can, because then you have the best chance of having as many grandchildren as possible, and then you've got a chance of having more time with them. Because getting old, you know what's good about it except grandchildren?

Most of them were homeschooled for almost all of the time. My primary training is in music. I was a Suzuki violin and kinder music teacher for the first third to half of my adult life. Then I kind of got into this business of teaching English composition, and that did really well. We made some videos, we started a little company, started publishing more things to help parents with really the arts of language, which we would identify as listening, speaking, reading, and writing, with the end goal of better thinking.

So that's kind of the world we live in. I don't teach music anymore, except I did just start teaching two of my granddaughters violin.

It’s great to be back in the saddle with that. I still travel quite a bit and do conventions, seminars, and workshops all over the world. So, yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:
You are definitely well-traveled as a speaker. I know that. How many miles do you put on in a year?

Andrew Pudewa:
I don't really log that, but I will say I'm very grateful because I almost always get first-class upgrades. Or I can buy the tickets with miles, so I get more done on the plane trips. But I'm usually traveling somewhere around 100 days out of a year.

Marlin Detweiler:
Hundred out of a year.

Andrew Pudewa:
Well, you know, some years a little more. Obviously, a couple of years were uncovered a whole lot less. So that was different and fun. But, you know, I'll keep going as long as people keep inviting me, and it's very rewarding. Marlin, believe it or not, I am out there meeting moms with ten-year-olds who were in my writing classes when they were teenagers. Yeah, you know, 20 years ago. It’s scary!

Marlin Detweiler:
We're not as young as we once were.

Andrew Pudewa:
But we can both be grateful we still have hair.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, we have. I had my 50th high school reunion of last summer. Well, and I don't remember all those old people in school.

Andrew Pudewa:
No, I wouldn't remember every single one of them. But must have been amusing at least.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. It was. Well, let's talk about reading and its foundational importance. As we think about learning to read, we tend to think about it as an exercise for the beginning of school with kindergarten in first grade. Is that an accurate place to think about it? What would you say to somebody that says that's where kids should learn to read?

Andrew Pudewa:
Yeah, well, I've been kind of at this long enough and had enough different kids. And you've met lots of kids that I've come kind of to believe that reading is more a brain function than it is something that can be taught and learned on demand.

Marlin Detweiler:
Interesting.

Andrew Pudewa:
So you can't really say, because a child is six years old, they can or should or must learn to read. One of the dangers I see, particularly with this push in education to kind of push reading earlier and earlier, and most public schools are using a very ineffective, inferior methodology. But one of the dangers of pushing a kid to read before they're developmentally ready is they'll hate it.

They'll be confused, overwhelmed, unsuccessful, and they'll keep hating it. And they may hate it so much that they hate it even after they come into this neurological period of being ready to do it. So I do caution parents don't have anxiety about whether a five-year-old boy is reading or not or wants to or not.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah.

Andrew Pudewa:
And of course, throughout history we've seen reading has been learned by young children, sometimes very effortlessly. And then sometimes reading is not learned by older children, even though you put a huge effort into it. Certainly, we know there's no doubt a good, solid phonics-based approach to introducing reading to children is the best way to do it.

Yeah. And so, I think you start around that age when children are likely to show an interest. They love looking at picture books. They're trying to figure out what the words are in their environment. Then that's showing some readiness and that's a good time to go. But again, I try to coach parents in particular.

And teachers don't have anxiety about them learning this according to your schedule because every kid's neurology is different.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Have you done any studying on that where you can connect some dots for us? That is what neurological readiness looks like. You've suggested it in terms of observation, but do you have anything more, any science on it that you can help us understand?

Andrew Pudewa:
Well, you know, there's lots of studies. I don't carry them all around in my head. But I think what we do see is there's probably a curve, right? And so on one end of the curve kids are just going to learn to read young. They're going to beg you to teach them. You know, I have a six-year-old granddaughter who's like this.

She always wants to try out her reading. And then you see, maybe kids hit that interest level, most of them a little bit later, six and a half, seven. That's when they kind of get a little more aggressive, maybe eight. And then you have the other end of the curve kids who just are flat out not interested or able to do it at all until seemingly very late, 8 or 9 years old. And that's usually caused by some kind of dyslexia, dysgraphia, auditory processing disorder, attention deficits, or other types of problems. I think all kids have neurological strengths and weaknesses.

The tendency is to be worried about kids who aren't learning to read easily, but they also sometimes have other strengths. The gift of dyslexia or the dyslexic advantage can be very helpful for parents. Having a good phonics program and understanding the principle of mastery, like having a set of things that you're doing and doing that until it's easy, and then and only then introducing the next complexity and practicing all of that until all of that is easy, and then and only then introducing the next one.

This, I think, is one of the challenges of putting kids in age-segregated classrooms. You have to say, well, everybody should be doing the same thing according to the same schedule, and then we'll get the same results. When that doesn't happen, it's frustration.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, that's particularly noticeable at the beginning of things too, like kindergarten and first grade. One of the things that we've observed, we've both published phonics curricula, and they both focus on—I say reading curricula—and they both focus on a phonetic approach. I think within the world of classical educators, that's pretty well accepted as a much superior way to what we might call the look-say or a more memorization-based approach because it provides tools for learning goals of reading in this case.

That makes perfect sense. One of the things we have observed is in using technology and allowing a student to shape letters as they're learning to write by using their fingertip rather than learning to hold a pencil has taken away a level of frustration that has provided a high level of motivation to do these things at a fairly early age. Have you run into that at all? Do you have any thoughts on that?

Andrew Pudewa:
Well, I'm very cautious about screens because screens have some fundamental harmful effects on young children. But I've seen the kind of thing you're describing. I think it's a little bit like Montessori, with the sandpaper letters and then the box. There's that tactile kinesthetic, and you're not burdened with holding the thing just right and getting.

Marlin Detweiler:
The big challenge for a large population of young people.

Andrew Pudewa:
So, I think there's certainly value to that. We don't want to teach that in exclusion to writing on paper.

Marlin Detweiler:
Right.

Andrew Pudewa:
Another really interesting thing, Marlin, I came across this not long ago. It was a research study that children can learn to spell all words before they can read them or write them.

Marlin Detweiler:
And I believe it.

Andrew Pudewa:
I think one of the first words some kids learn how to spell is ice. Because dad will say to mom something like, hey, do we have any of that I-C-E C-R-E-A-M? It doesn't take a kid very long to figure out, oh, that's your secret code. It's called spelling. You can actually teach a 4 or 5-year-old child dozens of three and four-letter words, practice them every day.

Add in the sign language alphabet—A, B, C, D—and then you can spell M-O-M. You can teach children to spell. The study I know of was done at Washington State University back in 2012. It showed that children who learn to spell words verbally could recognize them on paper much faster than words they didn't know how to spell verbally. So I think that's really it's an interesting connection between the speaking and the reading and the writing brain functions that are all integrated and tied together that way.

Marlin Detweiler:
Another thing that we've observed is the students who learn to read well are students who then have an academic advantage over their peers by being able to read more difficult books, more sophisticated books at earlier ages. And all of that has a compounding effect.

Andrew Pudewa:
Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:
What have you observed there, and what would you comment on that?

Andrew Pudewa:
Well, certainly, reading is the fundamental way that children expand their vocabulary outside of daily life. So if you're just hanging out with your kids or watching YouTube or whatever, they're getting a fairly small vocabulary. When you read a book, particularly if it's historical or historical fiction, you're moving into vocabulary that you just don't encounter in daily life.

And so the two aspects of reading comprehension are, number one, do you have the decoding skills to figure out that word? Like, do you know your tool sounds? But the other aspect is do you have experience enough to know what that word means? And therefore, you can make inferences while you're reading as to the meaning of the whole.

And those are two pieces that are really necessary. And I would say the public schools, to the degree they can get kids decoding, can be successful. But around fourth or fifth grade, the reading level of material goes up. They're hitting words they don't know. Right. And let's say you have a word.

You're a kid reading along, you hit this word and you try to sound it out. So, like, so what's this ligature? You know, there's no such thing. Is this like a... So then you have to eliminate that as a possibility. Go back and look at it. Oh, that's that "a" sound. So this must be a "sleigh." It's a sleigh. But that only works, Marlin, if you already know what a sleigh is.

Marlin Detweiler:
Interesting. Yeah.

Andrew Pudewa:
If you don't know what the thing is, you may be able to say it, but you can't read it and understand it. So this building of vocabulary happens in many ways. Number one, the higher level of vocabulary used by the parents and adults in their environment. Number two, reading out loud to children above their own decoding skills and talking about that stuff.

Defining words as you see them in books. Children desperately need to be read to build the vocabulary that will allow them independent reading at a higher level later on. All three of those things are tied together, and the things the schools can't do is read aloud to kids and talk about stuff. Right. And that's where the home has to do that.

And then what you'll see also is the kids' decoding skills will increase, but their comprehension skills, auditory comprehension skills, are higher. And you want that. You want them to understand language above their decoding. And then eventually, in middle school and high school, they start to catch up with each other. They see a word, they know what it is, and they can use it and put it in context and get the correct understanding and inference.

Marlin Detweiler:
Where would you say Latin contributes in this whole area? Naturally, as classical educators, we value Latin. I realize I'm asking the choir to comment on their music here. So tell me a little bit about what you think there.

Andrew Pudewa:
Yeah, well, we know a few things. Number one vocabulary. Over 60% of three or more syllable words in English are derived from Latin. So the higher vocabulary level can always be traced back. Sometimes the roots and the meanings are very direct, sometimes they're a little subtle. And I always say to people, you know, if you study Latin, you'll get like X-ray vision into English.

One of my favorite examples is the word diligent, right. You know this word? Everybody knows this word. How would you define it? Being perseverant doing what you're supposed to. Keeping your nose to the grindstone, being faithful, loyal. But it's derived from the Latin verb dialogo, which means to love. So why are we diligent? Because we love. I mean, that would make a good, you know, wedding sermon right there, you know, so that's one aspect is just supercharge vocabulary.

Another thing is when you get into higher level English, especially poetry. Right. Poets and authors will use words in a greater variety of patterns. They go further from the conversational English pattern into more literary patterns that sometimes is a little hard to understand. But if you've studied Latin, you're used to words being in different order because it's you know, it's the case in the and the tense and the number and all that.

And you match up the verbs and the nouns and so you start to view words as being a lot more flexible and artistically useful, I guess. Then you do, if you're just stuck in the way that we talk and write emails all day, every day. So I think Latin actually contributes to the poetic sense of language, which you have to have if you're going to go read an old book or a great poem.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, yeah. The connections and the inference that comes from studying Latin into English is really hard to overestimate in terms of its value.

Andrew Pudewa:
Anybody who ever studied Latin will say, I am so glad that someone made me do that, because now I know. Fill in the blanks. So it's definitely something. Once you start doing it, you stop being skeptical about the value. And you know, I always tell parents, stick with it for six years, you know, starting in fourth or fifth grade and don't stop. Don't do the two years of foreign language for the high school transcript deal. That's not what it's about.

Marlin Detweiler:
Really, what it's done to the students at Veritas and their ability to consume bigger, more difficult works is so impressive. It's so much fun to watch.

Andrew Pudewa:
Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:
What would you say to someone who is, you know, they're starting to have children. Their oldest child is now 3 or 4 years old. What would you say to them in terms of what to expose that child to for best advantage? With regard to the education focused on the category, the subject of reading.

Andrew Pudewa:
Yeah. So there's a term that I use. I remember when I first heard this term, I thought, that is exactly what I'm all about, furnishing the mind. Furnishing the mind is kind of a classical term. I first saw it in the book Jane Eyre, and she was commenting about Rochester's mind and how she loved the way it was furnished.

So you think about, okay, we all get a mind, some of us get a, you know, a great big mansion of a brain and others get, like me, a humble little bungalow. But what more important than that is what's in it, right? So you have a great big mansion, but if it's furnished with, you know, wooden crates and cardboard paper boxes, but you could have a nice little bungalow and it's got beautiful and useful, you know, paintings in that cottage.

So how are we furnishing? And I would argue that from a language point of view, we do that primarily through literature and memorized language. Right. So you've got a three, four year old kid and you say, I want this child to be very competent in reading and speaking and writing English. And years from now, 20 years from now, what should I do?

I will always say, well, number one, read aloud to them in huge quantity every day. That will create in them a love of literature. And when they get to an age of decoding successfully. And I've seen this again and again, eight-year-old boys hate reading, but they've been read to. They love literature. They get to hit ten years old now. It's not so hard. And they devour books, right?

Marlin Detweiler:
Interesting. Yeah. And so a real switching on of the, you know, switch on the light switch, so to speak.

Andrew Pudewa:
It just clicks and they'll be begging for books, whereas two years ago, you couldn't make them read a book without threats. So the love of literature will come through the listening, through the hearing. And it reminds me of the scripture, too. You know, the hearing of the word. And so that hearing of the beautiful language and the great imaginative stories that's going to create the affection for that higher level.

And then that goes into, you know, the love of philosophy and theology and science in the general liberal sense. The other thing that we neglect is memorization, right? I mean, that used to be a key part of every human being's education from about the beginning of recorded history until maybe a hundred years ago, right when John Dewey came in and said, no memorization at best, waste of time.

At worst, it stifles creativity. How do you make a kid memorize something? It should be all about creativity and exploration and self-expression, right? And, you know, there's some truth to education should have that. But when you throw out, you lose that memorized repertoire of language patterns, vocabulary, syntax, literary devices. So we start with, you know, nursery rhymes and simple poems, and then we give them longer, more beautiful poems and scripture and excerpts from famous speeches.

And, you know, if you memorize a beautiful part of the language, you own it. In fact, my mother did. She was a music teacher. She never said, memorize your music. She always used this expression. You must learn it by heart. We don't hear people say that much anymore. But when you memorize something, you take it into your soul.

You know it. You know that you know it. You own it, and it becomes a part of you. So we have to, I think, be careful about what children memorize. If you don't give them good and beautiful things, they'll memorize whatever garbage is in their environment. TV commercials and rap songs, right? And number two, you want to build that database of vocabulary and syntax and poetic expression, because that's what's going to also help their reading be more advanced.

They'll see an idiom or a metaphor of something, and they'll get it because they've already got it and they'll make the connection. And then when they go to speak and write, they're going to be more likely to speak and write in that effective, winsome way that we hope they will.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, it really does compound itself. One of the things that we did with our children when they were young is we would read the Bible together in the mornings at breakfast. And when they started to be able to, we had them each read. So we rotate around the table reading a chapter. So one of our children would read a chapter one day, another the next.

And, I'm curious because we didn't do it for any theological reason. We didn't do it for any educational reason. But I'm curious, what does reading aloud, especially the unfamiliar like that, do in the way of preparing students for the broader education that they're going to be getting?

Andrew Pudewa:
Yeah, I love that. And I am pointing out to parents that as soon as your kids are able to read aloud with, you know, a decent fluency, a decent speed, you want to be sure you give them opportunity each day to do that. So, it's very interesting because when kids read on their own, if they see a word that they don't know or it looks a little tough to figure out, or doesn't look important, they'll just skip it right?

See an idiom or an illusion they don't understand. They'll skip it. I mean, some kids can skip a lot of stuff. I mean, let's be honest, you can skip huge chunks of Tolkien and still get the story right. So reading on their own, they get to read for the story and they'll read like watching movies. Movies, of course.

Cut out 90% of the thing and just give you the images for. But when you have to read it aloud now, you can't do that, right? You see a word, you don't know what it is. You got to wrestle with it. You got to figure that out. And if you don't know, you ask. And then you learn and you read every word.

And then as you learn to do that better, you start to read with the cadence that gives meaning and the emphases that create the important nuance. I mean, language primarily is an auditory thing, and only secondarily does it become a written thing. And so when we move language from writing back into an auditory experience, it should enrich our experience of language itself.

You know, you could say three words in three different ways and have three different nuances, like you did that, you did that, you did that right. And on paper it would look the exactly same.

Marlin Detweiler:
But that will differ in meaning based on how they're articulated. Yeah.

Andrew Pudewa:
So reading aloud gives kids opportunity to work in that world of adding meaning to the printed word as they read it. And it's a specific skill. And, you know, I wanted all my kids to grow up reading aloud because I wanted them to read to their children well and become comfortable and happy doing that. I'm sure you thought the same.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, well, I don't know. I don't remember anymore what motivated us to do it in the first place. But what it did was far more than would ever motivate us to do it in the first place. And you're absolutely right. The whole idea of reading out loud and the ability to enunciate, I think it helped their public speaking.

I think it helped their vocabulary. Help them to keep their thoughts in front of their words. All of the things that happen in general communication were greatly aided by simply reading out loud, and Scripture was difficult enough for them at the young age that it was, a really good challenge for them. And it seemed to have a lot of benefit.

Andrew Pudewa:
Yeah, a lot of homeschoolers that I know want to get into speech and debate in high school competitive debate. And when you do competitive debate, one of the things you have to have the skill is to read your evidence. And so one of the things we would practice with the debaters at teenagers was cold reading. So here's a really hard chunk of technical text.

Now you got to practice reading that as best you can, because you may have to stand up in a debate and pull an evidence card and read that and sound good. And so that, you know, that's kind of a higher level of it. But it does that same thing. Like, I like the way you said keep their mind ahead of the words.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well that's the nature of effective communication, isn't it, where you're always one step ahead of what you're saying.

Andrew Pudewa:
Think before you feel, you know.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Hey, Andrew, always good to talk to you. Thank you for joining us. Again, on our podcast. Really good to have you.

Andrew Pudewa:

Happy to do so. And I hope I will bump into you sometime, probably in Florida or wherever else. And you guys keep up the awesome work there at Veritas. And, I very fondly remember many of our conversations from the past, so.

Marlin Detweiler:

It's, it's been a long, relationship of numerous decades now. Thank you.

Andrew Pudewa:

Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:

Folks, thanks again for joining us on Veritas Vox. The voice on classical Christian Education with Andrew Pudewa. Thanks, Andrew.